Getting a Vendor Price Quote

What is the easiest way to get a price quote from a vendor?

If you buy the same materials frequently, you may want to set up a standard "price request" sheet, and then give it to your vendor to fill out. That way you can always have recent pricing for estimating.

There are two different ways you can do that.

Price Request Report

To make a printed price request form directly from your database of material prices, follow these steps:

  1. Choose Cost Items from the Costs menu.
  2. Use the Find command to locate a group of items for which you want to get prices.
  3. Choose Inventory from the Reports menu, and choose Price Request Blank from the submenu.
  4. Turn on the More Details checkbox. Change the Item Range popup to Found Items. You may also want to change the breakdown to Simple List.
  5. Click the Update button to fill in a list of items.
  6. Click the Print button to print it.
  7. Give the form to your supplier, and beg or bribe them to fill it out.

HINT-- You can enter three "favorite" vendors into each Cost Item record (click the Vendor Prices button to see those fields). Then you can use the Find command to locate the items that you get from that vendor.

When you get a list of prices back from a vendor, follow these steps to enter them into Goldenseal:

  1. Choose Cost Items from the Costs menu.
  2. Use the Find command to locate the same group of items for which you want to get prices.
  3. Enter the new price. HINT-- You may need to change the Pricing Method to Manual, temporarily, so you can type in a price.
  4. Click the right side of the browser "book" at upper left, to move to the next record.
  5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you have entered prices for all the items.

Material Purchases

If you frequently request prices for the same items, you can save time by setting up a price quote record, and then using that to generate a printed Price Request form.

To set up a price request form, follow these steps:

  1. Choose Material Purchases from the Costs menu.
  2. Click the New button.
  3. Enter Pricing Only into the Status popup field on the left side of the window.
  4. Enter Items into the Breakdown popup field.
  5. Enter the Vendor that will provide the quote into the Supplier clairvoyant field.
  6. Click in the first row of the breakdown table, and enter a Cost Item for which you want to get pricing.
  7. Hit the Enter key or Return key to add a new row.
  8. Repeat steps 5 and 6 until you have a list of all the items for which you want to get prices.
  9. Choose Template This Item from the Options menu.
  10. Type in a name for the request, and click OK.

When you are ready to ask a vendor for their latest material prices, follow these steps:

  1. Choose Material Purchases from the Costs menu.
  2. Click the template button (the triangle next to the New button) and choose the template you created in the previous steps.
  3. Choose Print Forms from the File menu, and enter Price Quote Request into the Form Type popup field. NOTE-- this form is only included with Goldenseal version 3.7 and later.
  4. Click the Print button to print the request form.
  5. Give the form to your supplier, and beg or bribe them to fill it out.

When you get the list of prices back from a vendor, follow these steps to enter them into Goldenseal:

  1. Choose Material Purchases from the Costs menu.
  2. Use the Find command to locate the record that you printed.
  3. Click in the Unit Cost column for each row, and type in the current price.
  4. When you save or close the record, Goldenseal will automatically update prices for each of the listed Cost Items.

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Updated 19-Jan-2022 by Casey.

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